Text: David M. Rein, “The Appeal of Poe Today,” New Approaches on Poe, 1970, pp. 29-33

[page 29:]

Poe's works, in recent years, seem to be gaining in popularity. They appear frequently in books, hard cover and paperback, for the general reader as well as in texts for high schools and colleges. Book clubs occasionally use works of Poe as an extra inducement to their readers. The movies put out films based on or suggested by his stories(1) and there is at least one film concerning his life. Books and articles about him appear regularly, and not long ago a group of distinguished scholars began publication of a periodical Poe newsletter, a recognition accorded relatively few writers.

No doubt some of Poe's appeal comes from his lyric poems with their haunting melodies, and some from his stories of ratiocination, including his detective stories, with their world-wide fame and influence. No doubt some of his appeal comes from the original and outspoken literary criticism, and some from the air of mystery and melancholy that surrounds him as a man. Beyond all this Poe has appeal to a special class of sophisticated readers, including laymen, critics, and scholars. They are intrigued by the humor, satire, and irony in his fiction, or by its psychological insights, or — in terms of today — by its existentialist attitudes and surrealist imagery. They appreciate the structure and pattern of Poe's thought which, in one way or another, makes nearly all his work more meaningful.(2) Poe's greatest appeal today, however, comes from his stories of horror.

Over two thousand years ago that versatile man, Aristotle, who was — along with his other accomplishments — both literary critic and psychologist, tried to explain the appeal of tragic drama and, in doing so, resorted to psychology. Tragic drama, he said, evoked a sense of pity and terror and permitted the audience to discharge these emotions through a purgation or catharsis. For most of the time since Aristotle, literary critics have gone their own way without much benefit of psychology which, in fact, made relatively little progress and had little to offer.

In recent years, however, psychology (including psychiatry) has had more to offer, as literary critics have begun to notice. Perhaps in trying to understand the appeal of Poe's horror stories we can get some help from modern psychology.

Our first help, however, can come from Poe himself. When it was said that horror stories were derived from a trend in Germany, he explained that they came not from Germany but from the soul. I believe, to continue Poe's language, that they also appeal to the soul, to the inmost emotions. If tragedy can stir pity and terror and then, through a purgation or catharsis, provide emotional release, we might expect the horror story, which is often a form of tragic drama, to do likewise.

If Poe's horror stories came from the soul, or inner life, and if we gather the evidence from many stories, then the following picture of Poe's inner life emerges: A man considers himself to be in a dangerous and hostile world; he becomes apprehensive, even when there seems to be no specific cause; he suffers, sometimes from real torments, sometimes merely from his own fears of what might happen; he faces his fears with ingenuity and courage; at times, overcoming his fears, he strikes back at this hostile world; sometimes he illustrates the mechanism of displacement; that is, not knowing the original cause of his hostility, he attributes fault to an innocent creature which he then attacks; afterwards he feels guilt and is moved to expiate this guilt by confession of his misconduct or by exposure of himself to punishment.

In one story after another the chief character goes through one or more segments of this sequence. In some, as in “MS Found in a Bottle” or “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the emphasis is on the chief character as suffering victim; in others, as in “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Black Cat,” the emphasis is on the chief character as aggressor, attacking an innocent or unsuspecting victim, feeling guilt and then expiating his guilt by confession and exposure to punishment; in still others, as in “Hop-Frog” or “The Cask of Amontillado,” he both suffers and retaliates. [page 30:]

In each story, in whatever segment of this sequence, the chief character finds his fears or hostilities brought to some climax and, in one way or another, diminished or ended. In identifying with this character the reader undergoes a similar experience.

In our daily lives we are often at the mercy of nameless fears or vague anxieties, difficult or impossible to cope with. In Poe's stories the cause of the horror is given a local habitation and a name and is described in the most graphic terms, as a violent storm, a ghastly crew, a raging pestilence, a loathsome pit or, most horrible of all, premature burial. However formidable, these dangers can be faced and felt. The expected blow does fall and a man knows what he must contend with. He heed not, as so often in real life, just wait in helpless frustration.

In “The Pit and the Pendulum” the chief character, after being sentenced to death by the evil Inquisition, is carried deep down into a black dungeon. For awhile he thinks he has suffered the most hideous of all fates, premature burial. Then he discovers he is on the brink of a circular pit so fearsome it seems to typify hell itself. Soon he notices that above him is a pendulum, its edge of glittering steel, swinging slowly toward him. As he lies in this dungeon, with rats swarming over him, there seems no escape except in death. Thus he suffers until at last, unexpectedly, the Inquisition falls into the hands of its enemies and he is saved.

In this story the reader endures the fears and suffering of the chief character and also shares the deliverance. Happy endings can be excellent therapeutically, if they are credible.

In “The Masque of the Red Death” a horrible plague is sweeping the land, threatening everybody, including the prince. To escape its devastation he isolates himself and a thousand light-hearted friends in a castellated abbey. But in the midst of one of his festivities, a masked ball, a stranger enters, “shroud from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave,” horrifying the revellers. The prince pursues this figure through one magnificent room after the other, but when he finally approaches, the awful figure turns to confront him and the prince falls dead.

The reader of this story, if he identifies with the main character, shares the glamorous adventures of the prince and also his fatal disaster. If the dread figure in the story has been in any way a symbol of the dangers he feared in his own life, then he has, vicariously, endured these dangers. He can return to his own daily affairs feeling that, at least in some measure, these dangers are now over with.

“The Premature Burial” concerns a man who is cured of his extraordinary anxiety. For several years this man has been subject to attacks of catalepsy, which sometimes makes him appear to be dead. He fears that some day he might, in fact, be considered dead and would then be buried — only to recover and find himself the tenant of a grave. He takes various precautions, including the preparation of a coffin that could be easily opened from the inside. There comes a time when he finds himself in complete darkness. When he throws up his arms they strike a solid, wooden substance. He can no longer doubt that he is confined within a coffin. When he tries to escape he finds it is not the special coffin he had prepared. He must have fallen into a trace while away from home, he decides, among strangers who did not know of his affliction, and now he is buried alive, in a common coffin, deep in some nameless grave. When he shrieks aloud in agony, a gruff voice responds. Then he remembers: while walking along the banks of a river he had been caught in a storm and had found refuge in the wooden berth of boat — where he now is. The agonies he had endured, he believed, were quite equal to those of actual sepulture, but their very excess brought a revulsion. From that time on he overcame his fear of premature burial.

In some of Poe's stories the chief character is beset by fears and anxieties that have no discernible cause. In real life, in such a circumstance, all too often nothing dramatic happens. The victim merely suffers. But in Poe's stories the chief character becomes engaged in dramatic incidents which bring his fears to a climax. If he does not know who or what his enemy is, he finds or invents one to do battle with. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for example, the chief character [page 31:] at the outset of the story, has fears that are not accounted for. He gives vent to these feelings, however, on an innocent old man who has done him no wrong. Finding no fault with the man, he finds fault with the man's eye, and becomes obsessed with it. If in Herman Melville's famous story Ahab attributed to the White Whale the evil in the world, so Poe's character made this eye a symbol of evil — except while Ahab had a real grievance against the whale, which had bitten off his leg, Poe's character had no real grievance against this old man or his eye. Just as Ahab had to suffer for his hostile pursuit of this dumb brute, which had merely defended itself according to its nature, so Poe's character had to suffer for his misplaced hostility. Ahab failed to kill the white whale and met death. Poe's character did kill the old man, but was so overwhelmed by his sense of guilt he was impelled to expose his crime to the police.

In “The Black Cat” the chief character, as in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” has hostile feelings that are not accounted for. He has a congenial wife and he loves animals, particularly his cat. But he drinks, and his disposition grows worse. He mistreats his wife and pets including, at last, even his cat. One night, coming home intoxicated, he seizes his cat and, when it bites him slightly, cuts out one of its eyes. Later, without any provocation, he hangs the cat, now recovered, to the limb of a tree.

Some time afterwards he obtains another cat, very similar to the first one. Instead of becoming fond of it, as he had expected, he begins to dislike and then to hate it, even though it seems fond of him. One day he tries to strike the cat with an axe and when his wife interferes, strikes and kills her. He walls up her body in the cellar, concealing his crime. For awhile he feels happy and at peace. He sleeps well, “even with the burden of murder” on his soul. When the police search and, as in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” can find nothing, he himself volunteers the move that betrays his guilt.

The reader who shares the experience of the main character in these stories, where the true cause of the fears is not pictured, goes through a more complex procedure than in the other stories. Nevertheless, he is still permitted to release his feelings. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” and ‘The Black Cat,” he blames and destroys an innocent creature and acquires a sense of guilt, which he expiates. When the story is over he can separate himself from his fictional counterpart, who has been properly punished, and can return to himself, his emotions improved.

Can Poe's stories compete, in providing satisfactions, with the up-to-date, contemporary horror stories — commercial though they be — which appear so frequently in magazines, movies, and on television? Poe's stories, I believe, offer at least three advantages: they are more true, better constructed, and more relevant to our times.

With all their trappings of the gruesome and sensational, they still hold the mirror up to mature, truly portraying a man's inner life, including his fears and fantasies. Today's commercial stories, on the other hand, are just as inaccurate in depicting a man's fantasy world as in depicting the real world. One of their most common distortions — or oversimplifications — is their use of the monster, a powerful but implausible creature, not born from the anxieties and experience of the victim, but with an independent, incredible life of its own. At the end of the story, in a mechanical fashion, this monster is destroyed and the threatened victim, the hero, escapes unharmed. He had no inner problems at the outset and, with the monster out of the way, his worries are over at the end. All this might be very well — if it could be believed. But the discriminating reader is likely to feel that reality cannot so easily be managed.

To illustrate my observations I choose at random an example from a paperback shelf at a newsstand, The Shadow People, by Margaret St. Clair, (N.Y., 1969). In this story a young lady is captured by creatures from another world and brought to their domain, reached by going through strange cellars and across a mysterious water barrier. After some difficulty her lover is able to learn where she is and to get there himself. The inhabitants of this other world, many of them ex-humans, feed on human flesh and therefore go hunting on earth for their prey, which they often torture before killing.

The young man finally finds his girl, in miserable condition, chained to a wall. He succeeds in bringing her back to their own world, pursued by those who [page 32:] “can go among men as men.” These creatures harass and threaten, but at last he kills the most dangerous of them. Later he gets the Glain, a magical pebble which wards off all danger from the other world. He and his girl may live thereafter in security and happiness.

There is no psychological depth to the story at all. The incredible events follow one another in rapid succession and the chief characters react only superficially, undergoing no significant psychological changes.

The more famous monster stories, so popular today, follow the same general pattern. In the original Dracula are a young man and woman who love one another. She is menaced by a creature from the world of the undead who was once a man and who now endlessly preserves an unnatural existence by sucking the life blood from his victims and eventually making them like himself. He has certain extraordinary powers, such as the ability to change himself into a bat or a wolf; and certain extraordinary limitations, such as the inability to withstand a crucifix or daylight. He can be destroyed if he is found in his coffin, wherein he lies during the daylight, and if his head is cut off and a stake driven through his heart. The young man in the story gets the help of several others, and together they track down and destroy the monster. The young lady who had been partially in Dracula's power is released, and can live happily ever after with the man she loves. The character Dracula, like the creatures from the other world in The Shadow People, has an independent existence. His dreadful traits are his own, and not dependent upon the particular psychological make-up of any individual. He is a real creature moving about in the real world, a menace to all the chief characters and indicating nothing about the fantasy life of any one of them.

The original Dracula by Bram Stoker, published in 1897, has certain literary merits absent from most of the more recent horror fiction. If one can suspend his disbelief concerning all the supernatural elements associated with the monster — a difficult assignment for the intelligent reader — he may find the reactions of the characters quite plausible and sometimes moving. However, the cinema version of 1932 — with Bela Lugosi — is less effective, and the various sequels to the movie have very little merit at all.

Against the background of such horror stories as The Shadow People and the various versions of Dracula Poe's accomplishments stand forth more clearly. Generally, in Poe, the source of the horror is either some realistic creature or situation, as the dungeon of the Inquisition in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” or some fantastic creature or situation generated by the psychological energies of the chief character, as the nightmarish sequence in “The Premature Burial.” That is to say, the source of the horror is some truthful representation of the outside world common to us all or of the inner fantasy of an individual.

The emphasis in Poe is almost always on the psychological aspect, on the inner response rather than the external stimulus. In “The Premature Burial,” for example, a man goes to sleep in the wooden berth of a boat which, because of his longstanding psychological problems, he mistakes for a coffin and is quite overwhelmed by resulting fantasies. In “The Black Cat,” to take another example from the stories I have already discussed, the source of the horror is a rather ordinary cat. It is the morbid personality of the chief character that makes the cat so dreadful. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the source of the horror is an innocent old man.(3) The fear he inspires comes from the eye of the beholder, the chief character. In both ‘these stories events proceed to their inevitable climax, not an incredible rescue by a magical pebble or by a stake driven into the heart of a demon, but an unhappy ending, as demanded by logic and truth.

Poe's fiction is not only more true to reality than most horror fiction, but is also better constructed. In accordance with his theories, each part of a story is designed to advance the one main goal. There are no needless digressions, exploited for their own sake the way commercial stories today exploit violence. To be sure, Poe has his own share of violence, as do the great classics in general, but in his stories it is subservient to the main goal and is a cause or a consequence of the psychology of the person who performs it or of his victim. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for example, is a long description of the protagonist's thoughts and feelings as he proceeds toward the murder, which itself is described in only a few words. After that, very briefly — in eighteen words — comes an account of how he dismembers the corpse in order to conceal the body. In “The Black Cat,” to [page 33:] consider another example, the emphasis is on the feelings of the character as he kills his pet and not on the violent deed itself. In fact, one of the most eloquent passages in all Poe concerns the man's feelings as he proceeds to hang this animal he loved. It is, therefore, irrelevant to count the number of violent deaths in a Poe story or the amount of blood spilled per page, as is sometimes done by critics of commercial fiction. What violence is present is necessary.

One final reason for Poe's appeal today: He is particularly relevant to our Age of Anxiety. We who know the threat of increasing crimes, shrinking dollars, racial disturbances, wars and nuclear explosions, should be able to find ourselves at home in the fearful world of Poe, whose characters bring our own worst fears to a climax on the printed page and permit us some relief.

Case Western Reserve University

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[[Notes]]

1 The most recent is “Spirits of the Dead,” a package of three short movies, each suggested by a Poe story. One of the three is directed by the celebrated Federico Fellini,

2 See, for example, Richard P. Benton, “The Works of N. P. Willis as a Catalyst of Poe's Criticism,” American Literature [[,]] XXXIX, (1967), 315-324; Eric W. Carlson, “Symbol and Sense in Poe's ‘Ulalume,’ ” American Literature [[,]] XXXV, (1963), 22-37; James W. Gargano, “ ‘The Cask of Amontillado’: A Masquerade of Motive and Identity,” Studies in Short Fiction, IV, (1967), 119-126; Stephen L. Mooney, “Poe's Gothic Wasteland,” Sewanee Review, LXX, (1962), 261-283; Gary R. Thompson, ‘Dramatic Irony in “The Oval Portrait:’ A Reconsideration of Poe's Revisions,” English Language Notes, VI, (1968), 107-114.

3 Perhaps the nearest approach to such a monster as Dracula in Poe's better stories is the hero in “The Masque of the Red Death.” The figure, essentially, is not a supernatural creature at all, but an obvious, quite impersonal, symbol, a common fact of our experience. The chief character does not overcome this figure — as Dracula is overcome — but falls dead at the very first confrontation.